Social Media, Facebook Marketing
How to Market Your Local Business With Facebook
With 300 million people on Facebook, more and more businesses are taking this new medium seriously. Small businesses are using it to find new customers, build online communities of fans and dig into gold mines of demographic information.
Start Small
For most businesses, Facebook Pages are the best place to start. Pages allow businesses to collect “fans” the way celebrities, sports teams, musicians and politicians do.
Businesses can easily create a Web presence with Facebook, even if they don’t have their own Web site. They can claim a vanity address so that their Facebook address reflects the business name, like www.facebook.com/Starbucks. Facebook pages can link to the company’s Web site or direct sales to e-commerce sites. See our Facebook landing page HERE.
We recommend that newcomers start by asking themselves a simple question: What is your basic objective? Is it getting more customers in the door? Building brand awareness? Creating a venue for customer support?
We suggest that businesses ask friends and family to become fans of their pages so that they display a respectable crowd of supporters when they debut. Flaunt your personality. The page of an ice cream parlor should feel different than that of a funeral parlor.
It’s Not All About Selling
Some basic rules: Buy-buy-buy messages won’t fly. The best practitioners make Facebook less about selling and more about interacting. Engage with fans and critics. Listen to what people are saying, good and bad. You may even pick up ideas for how to improve your business. Keep content fresh. These interactions can take a vast amount of time but they can also provide a big payoff.
Aim at Potential Customers Only
Mr. Meyer, a wedding photographer in Woodbury, Minn., had had little luck with traditional advertising. A full-page ad in a bridal magazine generated zero leads and a trade show yielded only four bookings, barely covering the cost of his booth. But Facebook proved a digital bonanza.
Mr. Meyer aimed at women ages 22 to 28 who listed their marital status as engaged in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. He estimates that he has spent about $300 on Facebook ads in the last two years and has generated more than $60,000 in business. He says about three-quarters of his clients now come to him through Facebook, either from ads or recommendations from friends.
Facebook enables small businesses to engage in targeted marketing that they only could have dreamed about a few years ago. Facebook users fill out profiles with information like hometown, employer, religious beliefs, interests, education and favorite books, movies and TV shows — all of which can help advertisers deliver messages to specific demographic slices.
As you create an ad, you can add demographic criteria and keywords and see how many Facebook users fall into your target audience and modify it accordingly to get the most bang for your buck. Advertisers can elect to pay per impression or per click, set maximum budgets and schedule the ad to run on specific dates.
Click HERE to see a video on how to set up your Facebook ad.
The Facebook ad system provides instant feedback with metrics like the number of impressions and clicks-through. Make your ad relevant to the customer, keep it fresh and remember that the return on investment may come slowly.
People are not going to flock to your social media site overnight. Technology is about the network effect. It takes time for those connections to build.